Clinton, Obama Offer Similar Economic Visions

For Clinton, the new emphasis on the economy allowed her to push policies Thursday that align with the core of her message -- that she would help ordinary voters.

Her proposals are tailor-made for an industrial heartland hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs and crippled by mortgage defaults and rising debt. She would rescue the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a federal-local program for small manufacturers perpetually targeted for elimination by Bush, and would immediately limit credit card interest rates and stop credit card companies from raising those rates without warning and from applying higher rates to old transactions.

She would also establish a Financial Product Safety Commission, similar to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to crack down on abusive lending practices in the credit card, auto loan and mortgage markets.

To lower college tuition costs, Clinton said that she would crack down on lenders that shower college financial aid officers with gifts, stock options and trips in exchange for steering students to captive lending markets.

Many of those plans mirror Obama's promises. To pay for some of them, both candidates said they would eliminate tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. The current corporate tax code allows companies to defer taxes indefinitely on profits earned at facilities overseas. In 2004, Kerry proposed subjecting those earnings to taxation immediately but using the proceeds to lower the domestic corporate income tax, a plan designed to tack him to the economic center. Clinton and Obama see no reason for such gestures of moderation.

Clinton did offer far more detail on how her initiatives would be funded. She backed up her promise to invest tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy technology by handing the bill to the oil companies. They could either invest in renewable energy on their own or finance the federal effort, largely funded by imposing real royalties on drilling on public land and by repealing recent tax breaks.

Likewise, Clinton said she would end the "carried interest" loophole, a quirk in the tax code that has allowed private equity and hedge fund managers to pay tax rates of just 15 percent on millions of dollars in income. Attempts to plug that loophole have also run into bipartisan opposition from lawmakers flooded with Wall Street campaign cash. But Democratic economists have been in a forgiving mood toward both candidates.

"There's definitely some hand-waving here," Bernstein acknowledged, "but for people running for office, it's folly to ask precisely what they're going to do and precisely how you're going to pay for it."